A Night Beneath the Stars
by fcol
Summary: Oneshot.  Pre-ANH.  Aunt Beru shares a memory of Luke's father.


"Luke?"

"Coming, Aunt Beru!" Luke shouted in the general direction of the kitchen, but didn't look up from what he was doing. Something was rattling around in the engine of his old T-16, and he knew that if he didn't figure out what it was and get it back into racing shape by morning, he'd have no chance against Biggs and the others. It was a piece of junk machine, but Luke was pretty proud of the performance he'd been able to coax out of it this far. "Not just _my_ reputation on the line now, is it?" He smiled up at the ship, not expecting a response but not really feeling silly about talking to her either. It wasn't as if there was anyone else around who cared what he had to say, anyway.

"Luke!"

"What _is_ it, Aunt Beru?"

"Dinner's ready!"

Luke let out an exasperated sigh. He wasn't hungry, and he wasn't exactly in the mood to listen to Uncle Owen talk about the prices of whatever it was he'd driven into Anchorhead to buy that afternoon. "Yeah, okay. I'm coming." He put aside the hydrospanner he'd been holding and swung the T-16's hood back down into place. It wouldn't be worth it to fight over, either. All the repairs in the world wouldn't do him any good if Uncle didn't even let him fly tomorrow.

Aunt Beru smiled at him as he ducked through the low doorway to the kitchen. "How are the repairs coming?"

Luke smiled back, surprised that she'd thought to ask. "Good," he lied. "It's going to be fine by tomorrow." He took one of the plates that Aunt Beru had prepared and delivered it wordlessly to the table. Instinctively, he turned to Uncle Owen's place first – only to see that Aunt Beru hadn't set a place at the head of the table. "Where's Uncle Owen?"

"He got held up in Anchorhead." Beru looked up at Luke with an expression that seemed strangely matter-of-fact. Luke couldn't remember the last time his uncle had failed to come home for dinner, yet his absence seemed not to bother his aunt at all. "He'll be home in the morning. He told me to ask you to close down the farm for him tonight."

"Yeah, sure." Luke nodded. "I can do it, I mean… Is everything alright?"

Aunt Beru handed him a glass of milk and turned off the lights in the kitchen. "He seemed fine when he called. It's nothing, Luke." She smiled again, and Luke found himself believing her. "Come, let's eat."

They ate in a silence that was both comforting and strange. Luke had never realized before how little Aunt Beru usually had to say during his dinner conversations – arguments, usually – with his uncle. She was the quiet core of their family. Luke wondered when, if ever, he had last spent time with her alone.

To his relief, his aunt broke the silence first. "Are you having trouble with your speeder?"

Luke shook his head. "Not the speeder, the T-16. It's, uh… it's some kind of engine trouble." He caught himself about to launch into a rant about the problem. It was Aunt Beru he was talking to, after all. She wouldn't be interested in the details. "I think I'll be able to get it running by morning."

Beru smiled, and laugh lines spread like little sun rays from the corners of her eyes. "You get your mechanical skills from your father, you know."

Luke almost choked on his food. "M – my father?" His hand trembled a little as he reached for his glass, to wash down the word that had been all but forbidden in this house for as long as he could remember. "My father was good with machines?"

"He was."

"I wish… I wish he was here to help me." Luke stared down at his food, embarrassed.

"He would have been proud of you."

Luke had nothing to say to that. He wasn't so sure. His father had been a starpilot – okay, a navigator – but he'd traveled the galaxy, lived through the war. What had he done, that would make a man like that proud? Toasted a few womprats? Torn up his skyhopper trying to make that blasted hairpin curve? Nothing in Luke's life was worth being proud of. He was a lousy farmer and a worse pilot. He would live his whole life on this rock, and no one in the galaxy would ever know or care that he'd been born at all.

He finished his dinner in silence, rinsed off his cup and his plate, and threw one of Uncle Owen's ponchos over his head. It was too big for him, and Luke imagined that he must look like even more of a stupid kid. "I'm gonna shut down the condensers, Aunt Beru." Without waiting for a response, he ran up the stairs and out into the cool, empty Tatooine night.

Sometimes Luke looked up at the nighttime sky and saw a future full of possibilities, new worlds to see and explore. Sometimes he could only think about the past, wonder where in that endless sky his parents had been and what the stars could have told him about them. Tonight, though, he just saw a universe that was too big, too far away, and it scared him a little. He felt like he was hanging on to the bottom of the planet, and that any minute gravity would give way and let a vast, uncaring galaxy swallow him whole.

Beru watched her nephew – her son, he might as well be – disappear out the door. He was so grown up, and it had all happened so quickly. She felt very old for a moment, and then, as a sense of déjà vu washed over her, very young. She had almost forgotten about that night, so long ago, when another young man with the same unruly hair, the same piercing blue eyes had followed her out into the night and stood, as his son did now, at the edge of the southern range, watching the stars.

She left her own dinner unfinished and, pulling a worn bantha-skin cloak over her shoulders, followed the boy into the night. She saw him shiver, though the night was not yet cold, and turn his attention deliberately to the nearest of the condensers. His slight figure was hidden beneath his uncle's too-big clothes, and again she could almost believe that he was someone else, and that she was seeing another night, another time that she had convinced herself she had forgotten.

She had been a child, then – No, not really. She'd been married already, and older than Luke was now. She had been naive enough to trust her husband when he had come in that evening with Kenobi and Skywalker and asked her to put them up for the night, knowing that it was more than local trouble that had brought them back to Tatooine, but too afraid – of Owen or of the answer –to ask.

"Come on, Treadwell, get in there!" Luke's voice rang out in the silence, shaking her back to the present. The little droid he was talking to rolled a couple of feet in the direction of the shed, then stopped again, looking back at him with expectant eyes. "Well, go on!"

The droid went, but not without a moment's hesitation, and Beru nearly laughed in spite of herself. Luke had his father's way with machines, all right, but he hadn't quite mastered the art of talking to a stubborn droid.

"Let me help you, Luke." Aunt Beru placed a hand on his shoulder, and Luke jumped. He obviously hadn't realized he had been being watched.

"Wha-? Oh, I'm okay, Aunt Beru. That little droid just… he just keeps malfunctioning." Luke shook his head. "I've got it, really."

Ignoring her nephew's protests, Beru began the shutdown procedure on one of the other machines. It had been years since she'd been out here at night – ever since Luke had been old enough to really help his uncle, she realized. They asked a lot of him. Too much, maybe. "I'm sorry, Luke," she began, not really knowing what, exactly, she was apologizing for. "You know… he really would have been proud of you."

Luke stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. His eyes were wide, searching. "Did you know him?"

Beru looked down the sand beneath her feet, then at her hands, wrinkled and weathered, automatically working the controls of the vaporator. Owen would be furious with her for even having this memory, and yet… she had been a girl, once, and while her dreams hadn't been nearly as big as Luke's, or nearly as close to her grasp, she had still had them. "I did." She nodded. "Not well, and not for long. But I did."

"What was he like?"

"He was… like you, Luke. He was a dreamer. He wanted more than all of this." She closed the vaporator's control panel and gestured broadly to the farm, the house, the desert.

"He told you that?"

Beru nodded. "Yes, in a way." Where had Owen gone that night, anyway? Her memory failed her. He and Kenobi had left her here with the strange, charismatic Skywalker – a man who had both fascinated and terrified her, even then. Even before she could have possibly known what he would become. "When we were young. He'd already left home, but we saw him once in awhile. He could have named all the stars, I think, and told wonderful stories about the ones he had seen."

Luke fell silent, his expression pleading for more. Beru felt a twinge of guilt. Was it really for his sake that she was telling him this?

She sighed. "I don't remember the details." That much, at least was true. She had never been much for remembering the names of all the far-off worlds that Skywalker and Kenobi went on about. She and Owen were alike in that, at least. She'd always been more or less happy here. "When I saw him last, he told me that his… his ship was headed to Coruscant itself." That was also true, but it was no spice that he'd been planning to deliver to the ancient heart of the Empire. The memory of his voice as he'd told her about it chilled her even now, and she pulled the cloak tighter around her shoulders.

_There are secrets there_, he had told her, his voice growing deeper and softer as he'd continued to stare up at the night sky. _Secrets of the Force._

_The Force._ The word echoed in her mind, and beneath it she saw her nephew, who could fly blind through a sandstorm and hit a target too small and far away to see. Who knew things sometimes that he couldn't possibly know, and never seemed to realize that he was doing anything special when he mentioned them.

"Was he afraid?"

"No." Beru shook her head. "I don't think so. But he said that looking up at the stars made him feel… small, I think. And alone."

Luke looked up at the sky again, and understood what his father had meant. "I guess I sometimes feel that way too."

"He was a good man, Luke." And that night, at least, it had been true. "You won't tell your uncle that I told you this, will you?"

Luke met her gaze then, and he reminded her again of his father – how she had both feared and pitied him and the terrible power that he and Ben Kenobi seemed to share. He saw something in her that she had never meant to show, and embarrassed, Beru turned her attention back to the machine.

"What…" Luke hesitated for a moment, not sure if he should ask the question but knowing that he would never have another chance. "What about my mother?"

Beru did not understand, and certainly did not possess the strange sixth sense that she had seen in the older Skywalker and, only recently, had begun to see in his son. But her maternal instincts had not been dampened by her inability to have children of her own, and she knew what her adopted nephew was really asking.

She smiled sadly. "I never knew her."

"Yeah… yeah." Luke shook his head. "Sorry. I just…. Hey, Aunt Beru?"

"Yes?"

"I guess… I guess she must have been a lot like you."

He flushed, embarrassed, and turned his back to her, suddenly in a hurry to get the north range condensers shut down and get back to work on his skyhopper.

Beru watched him go, trying to tell herself that it was just the sand that had gotten in her eyes.


End file.
